When the Flood Falls

by J. E. Barnard

  Terry came. “Sorry, did we wake you?”

  “Not to worry. I got carried away looking at the gala footage and my brain went numb, if that makes any sense.”

  “Only because I know you. Want some lunch?”

  Jan yawned. “Yeah, maybe. Call me when it’s ready.” Then she drifted off again to the faint clatter of kitchen utensils. When Terry came back with a tray and the aroma of cinnamon French toast, she struggled into a half-sitting position. “Gosh, I really went out of it for a bit there.”

  “Must have needed it.” Terry set the tray on the coffee table next to her laptop. The screen woke up, showing the frame she had paused on. “Find anything interesting?”

  “Nope. I was trying to pin down Camille.”

  “Don’t trust my memory?” Rob set down plates and cutlery.

  “Just checking. If she offs people, don’t you want to know before you get back on her bad side? I mean, you could end up a witness in a nasty divorce case, unless the stress of living with her kills poor Mick.” She picked up her dish of digestive supplements and the glass of water Terry had supplied.

  “That brings up a good point.” Terry loaded up his plate and drizzled maple syrup over everything. “Why would she kill Jarrad? I don’t buy the whole woman-scorned thing for a second. Especially since we now know it wasn’t him she was screwing last week.”

  Rob placed a sliver of butter precisely in the centre of his toast. “Maybe that’s how she disposes of her leftovers. Poor Jarrad. And poor Mick. Or should I say poor Chris? He’s the one suffering alone in silence. I doubt there’s another soul alive who cared about Jarrad like he did.”

  Jan reached for a plate. “Do you think you’ll see him again?”

  “Not likely. Apart from the sheer bad taste of pursuing a guy over his ex’s grave, I’ve realized that being an intermittent hockey fan isn’t enough grounding for involvement with a player. They have their own dialect. Words and phrases that I think mean one thing say something entirely different to them.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, this line about doing a dance or pulling a dance on somebody. I thought it just meant to fake them out, get around them on the ice. I could see that meaning translating to situations off-ice, couldn’t you?”

  “Sure. But it doesn’t?”

  “No. Chris used it a couple of different times in the context of targeting someone or doing them ill. Vague, I know. It was more in the way he said it.”

  Something was trying to claw through the fog in Jan’s brain. Had Lacey talked about a dance? “How, exactly, did he say it?”

  “Just, ‘I was afraid Jarrad was coming up here to do a dance on somebody.’ Stuff like that.”

  “Faking out Mick over Camille, maybe?” That thought wasn’t even denting the cotton balls in her cranium.

  “Nope,” said Terry. “Camille had moved on by then. Maybe it was Camille he was after, was going to punish her for dumping him after he dumped Chris for her?” The men went on discussing while Jan concentrated on getting food to her mouth. Finishing a single slice took forever. By the time she pushed her plate away, Terry and Rob had demolished the French toast and the case against Camille and were kicking around a plan for launching pumpkins off the deck come Halloween. “But could we hit Dee’s porch from here?” Terry asked, and then, “And what would she do to us if we did?”

  “You don’t want to know.” The mention of Dee reminded Jan of Mick’s car leaving there earlier. Why was he at Dee’s when nobody was home? And what exactly had been on Lacey’s mind earlier when she fretted about Camille going to the hospital? She couldn’t seriously think Camille would kill Jarrad, run over Dee, ditch the car, steal Dee’s laptop, and then go after her in the hospital? It was far too much effort for a woman who didn’t walk anywhere she could drive to. Jan swallowed the last of her cold tea to wash down the last bite and wished her head would clear. “Somebody tell me if Camille’s Bimmer is still in her driveway.”

  Rob went out on deck. “Nope. Looks like she’s at the museum. Guess I should go down and find out what the hell she’s mucking with now. That woman tangos to her own drummer. ”

  Tango music pulsed in Jan’s brain. For sure Lacey had said “dance” earlier, on the phone. Not tango, but dancing? Oh, curse this flaky memory. Jan lay back and put both feet up on the back of the couch, hoping the rush of blood to her head would access that half-formed thought. According to Chris, via Rob, Jarrad was pulling a dance on somebody. What did hockey and dancing have in common? Something was crawling persistently through her mind, but it couldn’t break through to the surface where she could see it. She couldn’t finish the videos in this state of exhaustion, either. She spoke out loud before her sluggish brain could stop the signal to her tongue. “I need a magic pill.”

  Terry looked up. “No! You’re half dead already, and you haven’t recovered from the last time.”

  “Please, Terry. I only need half. Or a quarter.” He glared at her. Should she insist? Was this dance thing really important enough to start a squabble with the husband who did everything he could to make her life bearable? She subsided on the couch, eyes closed, trying to relax and let the urgent information rise naturally up her train of thought. But it didn’t. Her mind wandered, drifted, from one image, one half-formed thought, to another. Vaguely, she was aware of Terry and Rob resuming their conversation about pumpkins flying off the deck. Like the dancing pumpkins in a Halloween cartoon. What cartoon? Dancing … dancing with Terry at somebody’s wedding. A tango with Rob at the fine arts faculty’s annual masquerade. An Ice Capades tango on skates. Hockey. Hockey players don’t dance. The Calgary Hitmen with ice dancers? Something was important about that. What? It skimmed tantalizingly close, and then away again, like a forward circling the net. She opened her eyes.

  “A quarter pill. I’ve got what might be a vital clue flopping around in my head, and I have to jack up my brain to get it out.”

  Terry said, “You can’t do that. You know the rebound exhaustion will be ten times as bad.”

  “I have to. I need my brain firing on all cylinders. If Camille is a murderer, she might be at the museum right now tampering with evidence.”

  “Lacey would notice,” said Rob. “She’s working there today.”

  “I still want it. Something is wrong. I can feel it. Please.”

  “Rob, don’t move,” said Terry. “Jan, if you try to take that pill, I will flush the whole bottle down the can. I’m serious.”

  “So am I.” Jan struggled to sit up, desperate to communicate her creeping terror, to make him see how vital her brain’s locked-up information might be. Something in all those hockey tapes had flipped a switch, but which one? Dee’s life, Lacey’s life, might be at stake. Those were way more important than anything anybody thought of her, including Terry. Why hadn’t she taken him up on that wheelchair? She could have powered down the hill herself to see what was going on.

  She slapped her hand on the coffee table. “All right, here’s the deal: I get one measly quarter of a pill today and tomorrow you can flush the whole lot. Then you can take me shopping for a wheelchair. I’ll try it your way for a while.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The cable crimpers were not in the tool box. Lacey gathered up the various implements strewn along the stair and returned them in batches to the box. Each handful landed with a collection of clacks, clanks, and clunks. Amplified against the metal elevator door and the clay room’s wide window, they assaulted the silence of the empty building. Today was the last day she could spread cable to hell and back without inconveniencing anyone. If she could just find the crimpers to put the screw ends on.… Where had she used them last?

  She’d been carrying them Friday, on the way to the vault. Those, and the replacement for the little plastic stool the killer rack had torn apart. The vaultmaster had been pouting — but then, when wasn’t he? — while Rob s
prayed the cluster of flies around the elevator. If she’d left the crimpers in the vault lobby, behind the police tape, she was screwed. She’d have to ask Wayne for a spare pair or go buy replacements. First the stool, then the crimpers. That vault was damned bad luck for her. And the cameras still weren’t wired. Something she would have to face again after the police tape was removed, and who knew how long that would take?

  Wayne’s voice popped into her head. “This has fucked my schedule backward over a barrel.” He’d been holding the crimpers at that moment. She had handed them to him before stepping into the vault that reeked with the ineffable odour of decaying flesh. Where had he said that? No, not down in the vault. Somewhere with light and air and the sound — she shivered reflexively — of the roaring river as it churned by outside the windows. The administration suite! If he’d put them down before leading the crime scene team to the vault, they might still be in the office area. That would save her Sunday afternoon’s work and save her some face when Wayne wanted a progress report in the morning. She set the toolbox by the yellow-taped elevator to be out of the way and dashed down the half flight to the administration level.

  The crimpers were in plain sight on an end table between two chairs. It was a measure of the day’s disturbance that Wayne hadn’t counted his tools at the end of the day’s work and retrieved them himself. She swiped her card over the pad and stepped through the glass door to be met by the river’s rumble. Her eyes told her the water level outside was lower by far than it had been a couple of days ago, but in this deserted space, with the torrent roaring not far enough below the office windows, the sound was as ominous as ever. Ragged piles of mud and debris made a jagged mess. The Corvette’s front tires left ruts gouged into the bank. Had that been only Wednesday? Had it been only a week today that Dee had been struck down?

  A lifetime’s worth of a week. She suddenly felt exhausted, too tired to move her tool box, much less the ladder she would need for running cable above the ceiling tiles in the classroom wing. As the glass door closed her out, away from the river noise, she headed not up the stairs, but across to the kitchen. Refill the tea, regain some perspective. The flood was falling. Dee was recovering. The job here was almost finished.

  So few hurdles left: finish the cabling, get a lawyer for the next time the police questioned Dee, find Dee’s attacker. If that hit-and-run driver was the same person who killed Jarrad — and it seemed improbable that two violent criminals had made tiny Bragg Creek their target in the past week — then Dee wouldn’t need the lawyer. And Lacey would have atoned, in some measure, for leaving Dee alone last weekend. She would also be doing a public service, one worthy of the ideals she’d used to serve before they were burnt out of her by those last months on the Force.

  The time had come to clear away the mental debris and the eliminated suspects and see what was left. After filling the kettle, she hiked her butt up onto the countertop in the bland grey kitchen and checked her mental investigative notebook. Suspects in Dee’s attack only:

  Jarrad, formerly #1, was ruled out due to being dead at the time.

  Jake could have wanted Dee dead or injured to avoid accountability for bugging her office and could have gotten Jarrad’s car keys to do so. His friends were inclined to be understanding over his attempt to contact his ex-wife, but his alibi for Sunday afternoon had not yet been looked into.

  Camille had access to Jarrad’s car but, unless she thought Dee could implicate her in Jarrad’s death, had no known motive for attacking Dee. Jarrad’s death was a separate category, for now.

  Eddie Beal, despite Lacey’s initial suspicion, had no history of violence, no known motive beyond disapproving of the museum, and no known access to Jarrad’s car. His hothead brother was far away at the oil sands during the whole affair. They were most likely not involved.

  Rob had had plenty of other opportunities to harm Dee and no discernable motive for doing so. In fact, his job was only tolerable because of Dee, which gave him a compelling motive for wanting her fully functional.

  Neil … honestly, there was no evidence to support his involvement. Lacey’s ongoing suspicion of him had been part statistical, part policing experience, and almost certainly part of her ongoing worry that Dan had actually tried to kill her that day on the riverbank. But Dan was a separate category, to be dealt with when the current crises had passed.

  Not all of Dan’s impact could be set aside so easily, if she was being honest. How quickly had that unacknowledged emotion of hers overturned all her investigative training! If she had faced up to her fear from the first, she might have been quicker to eliminate Neil as the prowler, instead of clinging to him as the chief suspect. Might she have identified Jake as the prowler sooner, and then pinpointed the real source of danger in time to save Dee from being run down? She mentally apologized to her RCMP trainers. They had been correct that linear procedure must be observed and all suspects thoroughly checked out, even — or especially — when a gut instinct pointed to a particular suspect.

  The kettle clicked, so loud in the stillness that she half-slid from the countertop. She dropped the teabag into her to-go mug and set her phone timer for five minutes to brew. Then, since she was up anyway, she paced the length of the kitchen and back along the other side of its central island. In the building’s hush, her boots on the tiles were preternaturally noisy. Somewhere, an air conditioning duct whispered, and a breath faintly tinged with decay drifted down from the ceiling. A lone fly followed it. The building was taking its time clearing out the odour of death. Once the cleaners could get into the vault and wash everything down, there’d be nothing left for the flies to follow.

  And so to Jarrad’s murder. If she couldn’t hand the police a viable suspect for that by tomorrow morning, Dee would need a lawyer, which she could ill afford, and she would face highly stressful questioning, for which she had no resilience to spare. How she must be regretting that golf club through the windshield! It was the one tangible incident showing her fury and grief. She’d never have done it if she hadn’t been chronically sleep deprived from Jake’s prowling. Since they couldn’t tell the police, much less a jury, about the bug or the prowling, she would come off as ragingly unstable and therefore capable of killing Jarrad. She had full vault access and knew better than any other suspect — because Lacey had gone home and told her all about it — that the rack was potentially fatal.

  So, suspects in Jarrad’s death, excluding Dee:

  Jake had been downstairs during the crucial time and could have lifted Camille’s key card, but he had no known motive for killing Jarrad.

  Rob was hardly in the picture, save for that wild stretch of imagination that put two gay men who had never met each other into a compromising situation in a place and time where both had a lot to lose by being caught, and having it go fatally wrong. Some of Lacey’s ex-colleagues would have run with that scenario just because homosexuality was involved. She wasn’t one of them. There was no evidence against Rob at all.

  Camille had time, between leaving the stage and escorting Jake, to go to the vault and back; furthermore, it was her key card that accessed the vault and only her word that it had ever been missing. As to motive, was she afraid of what Jarrad would do or say once he realized she had thrown him over for the actor after he had betrayed Mick and thrown over Chris for her?

  The timer went. Lacey fished out the teabag and tightened the lid. Picking up the crimpers, she headed back to the classroom wing, trying to think of any other suspects in Jarrad’s death. Only the Camille theory fulfilled Occam’s razor; it was the simplest explanation that fit all the known facts.

  As Lacey dragged the ladder into position and ran the guide pipe up over the ceiling-tile support, she tried to look at Camille’s motives and behaviours from all angles. Could it have been self-defence? Maybe Jarrad had accosted her once they were downstairs with nobody around. Maybe she had taken him to the vault so they could th
rash out the issue without being overheard. Maybe it had been an accident, after all … except that she’d left him there to die while she carried on with her affair and her weekend partying.

  Down, then, to two suspects for Jarrad’s murder: Jake and Camille. Which of them was most likely to have attacked Dee? Dee had probably seen one of them downstairs in the theatre with Jarrad. She might not remember now, but on Saturday she could have said something in front of either of them which would only have been important to whoever knew Jarrad had not left the vault the night before. To that person, it was vital that Dee never have the chance to tell anyone else. Into the mental notebook went the notation to pick through Terry’s, Jan’s, and Rob’s memories of the Saturday evening at Jake’s for any overheard conversations between Camille and Dee and what exactly Dee had yelled at Jake. There might have been phone calls, too, but those could have been follow-ups on the gala, and anyway, she couldn’t re-create the conversations.

  She moved the ladder along the loading bay corridor, climbed up, lifted the ceiling tile, and groped for the end of her guide pipe. As she shoved it farther along between the roof and the tiles, the next piece of the puzzle came to her: the break-in at Dee’s and the attempted destruction of the laptop. Who would know that the laptop held recordings from the bug beyond Lacey, Dee, Tom, Bulldog, and Wayne? Dee might have let that slip to Jake in her tirade, but the dogs wouldn’t have barked at him. How would Camille have found out? Jake wouldn’t have told her for fear she’d tell his ex-wife what he’d been trying to do.

  Down the ladder, move the ladder, up the ladder. The laptop had been found on the downhill trail that crossed Camille’s back lane three houses farther on. The recording had to contain some clue, or why would Camille — assuming it was her — try so desperately to retrieve the thing and to silence Dee, the only person who had listened to it?